Nancy Pelosi, Marcus Aurelius Biden and St Thomas Aquinas
President Obama called for an informed dialogue about abortion the other day at a Catholic University, and it occurred to me that I wasn't very sure of the reasons for the catholic position on the modern version of the practice.
I'm not alone. Last year, in the last third of the election season, Nancy Pelosi saw fit to correct St Thomas Aquinas, or rather, one bit of Aquinas' thinking on abortion. Joe 'Mad Jose' Biden (late of this blog) complemented some of the arguments she put forward with some of his own slightly later.
Ms Pelosi's basic point was that, as a Catholic, she believed that the teachings of the church on abortion were Thomist, and that St Thomas was either confused or wrong about when a foetus became a child. This was because Aquinas had written that 'ensoulment' or 'quickening' happened after conception. She then went on to go on about other people's right to an opinion and linked the two to a vague determination to support abortion without going on about it.
I thought that she was wrong in that the Catholic position was that a foetus was a child for all moral purposes because it had the potential to be one; but I think that she muddied the waters by mentioning Aquinas.
I shouldn't have expected much. Speaker Pelosi got to this point having confused Aquinas with Augustine. I suppose if it's not something you generally think about that it's easily done. I thought at the time that hers was a curious rendition of the saint's complex views, but I think didn't dwell on it. American catholic politicians having their cake and eating it are one of life's cynosures.
Today, after re-reading Anthony Kenny on the issue, I thought that I'd return to it. St Thomas, whose twelfth century philosophy has been in vogue for the past century and a half in catholic circles, was a prolific writer. In addition, he wrote in a very nuanced form of latin, which most people, and certainly not myself, cannot translate with complete accuracy.
So there are lots of views from Thomas, which evolve over time. One of the features of his thought is to attempt to reason from nature the rules of God's world, rather than to take the rules or God as a given. This does tie him at one point, to a slightly weird homoncular science in which only male sperm count. Contraception and abortion were, on that line of reasoning, a form of homicide as was masturbation, a point taken up by Pope Sixtus V in 1588. Anything Sixtus V did, however, should be accompanied by a one-sentence DVD commentary stating simply, 'this is all to do with the counter-reformation and the effort to shape the early baroque mind'.
Aquinas seems, having written what he wrote, to have stood back, thought about it, and reflected 'hang about a bit, this is mental, I'll go and have a think'.
He then went on to think that a foetus is not a baby until it gains a soul. He thought that this soul went through stages once it had proceeded from God, which were essentially equivalent to those of vegetables, animals, and humans. The soul still came from the man, but was also aided by God and sunlight. For this, Aquinas turned to Aristotle.
Then Aquinas went quiet again about embryoes and abortion, before three brief mentions; ultimately, Kenny and Robert Pasnau argue, Aquinas only accorded humanity to an embryo when it developed the capability for conceptualisation.
For Aquinas, the only definite thing that can be said, is that he thought late abortion was sinful, as did the common law, and a host of secular and Christian thinkers. He can't however, be the basis for saying that abortion at all times after conception is wrong; and I think Pelosi knew that.
In England, a process of testing and discarding similar but secular philosophical arguments went on twenty years ago. When the Warnock Committee discussed embryonic experimentation in its 1985 report, several of its members ended up agreeing with Aquinas, as did the final report.
Even Kenneth Clarke, the lumbering member of the British establishment who was distinguished not by being impressive in historical terms, but because of the tiny politicians around him, got in on the act and declared that a zygote does not become capable of being a human until 14 days after conception. Here's a 1985 debate involving him, Enoch Powell, and Uncle Tom Cobley and all. In those days, enough of the lingering light of education hung around Parliament that people thought they should think about things before having a view on them.
The most, according to Anthony Kenny, that Aquinas and secular philosophers who embraced his logic, or who share it, can support is a ban on abortion after 14 days gestation. That Speaker Pelosi and Vice-President Biden didn't address that point is unsurprising. They wanted a way to neutralise the issue or to support abortion whilst still claiming the moral patina of catholicism. Plus ca change, frankly.
What is surprising to me, (and I don't write as a great fan, though I noted her association will Bill Clinton and the various Chinese human rights acts she sponsored in the early nineties) is that--I can't deny this--on the point that St Thomas is complex, contradictory, and confused about abortion, Pelosi wasright. As a general rule, she is reliably wrong on everything else.
That's why catholic thought on abortion is not just simply founded on Aquinas but has many points that secularists could agree with, and also is possessed of multiple roots.
I found myself agreeing more with the Church and its logic than with Aquinas on the point, which you won't be surprised to read. Also, though, thinking about this issue makes me think of many other things. One thing, for instance, is the contrast between the Catholic taste for potential or category membership of humanity, and Lockean, individualist ideas that only persons capable of reason and reflection can be human beings with rights. I suppose that's the human rights argument for killing the likes of H.M or Clive Wearing, the men without memory, which is basically a tad 'Nazi', and for all the euthanasia and death culture and population control that gets these people going.
Honesty precludes me from denying that the idea of life beginning at conception was one that only became dominant in catholicism in 1869, at Vatican One. The subject of my doctorate, John Hughes, lived near Madame Restell, the famous abortionist, in New York in the 1850s, and fulsome though his asides about her were, I never found any reference to her as bad specifically because of early-term abortions. Then again, even though I lived with Hughes more or less for five years in my head, perhaps I did not read all the pamphlets. He always had more of a grasp of his own power and centrality as an Irish-American bishop than he did of church teaching, such as it was at the time.
It's a weird thing to say, but most of my intellectual life has been shaped by medieval, Roman, and Victorian thinkers, and a deep distrust of modernity. It may be that you have already decided that, having read this far, but all I would say is that human nature doesn't change, wisdom stays as wisdom and we have no duty to live in the moment.
I just wanted to record all that. I know several people who have had abortions, including friends I love very much, and I was very opposed to partial-birth abortions. I won't start shouting my views from the rooftop. As a citizen, I would like to see the time during which abortion is available restricted severely, down to 12 weeks, and as a catholic I think it a bad thing; I would be happier if none happened at all. Who wouldn't? No one I know who has had one was anything other than deeply saddened by it, if not traumatised. By contrast, some of its supporters seem frankly evil to me when they promote it.
I suppose, I am aware that there are reasons behind the Church's teaching. I understand that Speaker Pelosi and Vice-President Biden tried to apply lawyers' arguments to them to justify abortion. All credit to them; I suspect that many in the debate have never even looked at why they think what they think. Yet, if they are going to start taking on or co-opting St Thomas, and suggesting that a gamete or an fertilised egg can't be human and so could be aborted, I have to ask why they think that a fertilised zygote that may have split as far as it is going to into twins or triplets or so forth, isn't a human, or why a blastocyst isn't, and certainly why a foetus isn't.
By the logic they invoke, any or all of them could be, because they are capable of becoming one and cannot except by accident or choice be stopped from doing so. A foetus certainly would; a blastocyst almost certainly would; a diploid zygote on the balance of probability might. A gamete may or may not.
Somewhere, a line is going to have to be drawn way below the present stage of a mid-to-early term foetus, and then Ms Pelosi and Mr Biden aren't going to be able to invoke St Thomas as anything other than an opponent. The restriction argument will ultimately prevail.
Comments
Martin i.t.M.
I think increasingly that President Obama isn't going to succeed (mostly because the economy is so bad) and that America is going to move decisively, either in a good or bad way, towards a much smaller, lower-tax, less ambitious federalism. The thing holding that back at the minute is the bankruptcy of many states. In that context, I wonder how long Roe v Wade will last, and how long it will take for the Supreme Court to return the issue to the states.
On the matter of leading catholic politicians, the problem is that catholicism isn't liberalism--as I suggested, it isn't compatible with a Lockean, contract-based world of individual rights so much as a world of balance, limitation and community. The media are not capable of allowing the philosophical difference to subsist and politicians feel the need to practise America's civic religion with a patriotic liturgy, as it were, in a way their real religion can't suffer.
Very many good men and women have died for America who were catholics, and fight for it, and what allows them to thrive is America's tolerance and freedom of thought, but if pushed, the church's teaching and the interpretation of rights by some in the republic will start rows.
What President Obama is really calling for is deliberate forgetting and ignorance to calm everyone down. I am genuinely not sure if that is sensible.
????? Was that badly phrased, or do you have a split personality?
Look, this is a liberal society full of people who do not share my views and who spend their time surrounded by half-informed anticatholicism. I am a subject and I have been called to the bar and, over the course of my life, been held to various standards both as a Doctor of Philsophy at Oxford and a non-practising Barrister.
Either I can isolate myself and convince everyone that they are someone different from me, or
I can say 'there are two forms of logic here'.
There is a secular, objective logic, and there is a religious logic--and it is a logic, but you have to come through the faith of the past 150 years or so to see it.
The secular logic is that, if I make an argument that abortion is wrong I can only do so on two grounds. One is that the foetus is a baby that can survive outside of the womb, and that the choice is to save it or kill a child. That can only restrict abortion by a few weeks--vital time, but only a few weeks. To make that argument, others must see genuine honesty from me.
I can make the argument that a diploid cell or a blastocyst will inevitably develop into a human being barring accidents or design, and this will make the moral, non-religious case (analagous to that of St Thomas) that abortion should be restricted down to, at most, 14 days after conception, which of course does not happen in the womb. This is because potential capacity to be human covers all those who are human but who may not be reasoning adults.
As a citizen, these are the only arguments I can make because if I start making religious arguments, every whacky religionist in the universe has a right to influence my life and frankly, I'd only put up with that from people whose faith I respected (which I am honest enough to admit is not every group). My faith should not be the standards of your behaviour. Our shared reason about what we can agree is right could be.
As a catholic, I follow the faith. I see the logic. I do not, I might point out, therefore lend my mind to the curia, or the bishops, or the pope when not talking ex cathedra. God help me if I did, given the state of half of them (though I deeply respect the present Pope).
I walk the path of the church and I expect us to be judged in eternity for what we do. I believe that Jesus Christ died for me, I mean it when I speak the Nicene Creed, though I don't know how, and I love my friends. I have known people who have died and people who have killed in the course of my life, and as I get older I need more to reach out to others as much as to hold to what I think right.
So there. Sorry for the personal nature of the post. Reason and Revelation, love and the mind go together, but I am in no fit state to hold forth on either as a paragon of anything.
Back soon, but in the meantime: it might be because I failed to lapse after leaving school that I ended up seeing the logic of the case against contraception, but I saw the non-religious logic of why it's mingin' quite apart from any theological case and that quite apart from any consideration of wrong-cause-Church-says-so (like not fasting on Fridays). The last case can be made with papists, the middle one with prods, the last one with anyone who doesn't deny the principle of non-contradiction.
Much much more so in the case of abortion. There maybe a religious case, but it builds on the natural (non-religious) one.
But we live in the world. Who did more to end slavery--John Brown, who declared against it and hated it and died in opposition to it, or Abraham Lincoln, who wrestled with ways to bring those who would just run away from the abolitionists to see how to end it?
There are so many demands on my time, and my mind has always been more robust than dancing. Anyone who tells me I have to believe a thing that is elaborated from a truth needs to convince me not only that their logic is correct but that it is better than anything else, and as a personal thing I'll probably balance that against what I see it doing to others and what I think can be done.
You've touched on a point about me--bringing it round to narcissism--which others have made before. I'm not intellectual in the sense that I'm happier with ideas than with the people who have them or the people they touch. I am mixed up, you're right, but why would I want to be isolated from the world at this age? love is found around us in others, in this world, Berenike. No apologies!
my 'pologies for being a pain.
I think that there is a basic difficulty in countries like the United States for people whose religion, as I guess it should be, is the whole of their life. A civic republic demands that people approach problems as citizens and make arguments that would be for the common good on a civic basis; but if they use religious arguments, which ultimately they cannot prove since God made so many different opinions, they risk having the religious opinions of others, including atheism, imposed on them with a dollop of made-up civic faith. It's a kind of deterrence, born in part from American calvinism, in part from the common law, and in part from the nurturing of reason in northern europe. A certain type of enlightened American also needed to appeal to French approval.
All this meets with Catholic ideas in the states (and catholicism is now the plurality, almost default religion over there) and needs careful handling.
That's one thing. Another one is me as a catholic trying to feel my way through this debate with courtesy not as a fetish but as a shield and a guide, as a person of Irish European heritage in Britain. Again, I can't even rely on the separation of church and state or the living civic society of America, because I'm inside a protestant imperial husk that has been patchily modernised and given over to all sorts of badness in parts.
Nothing gets done if I just shout and refuse to try and generate arguments that aren't rows but statements, that's all.
Sorry for the long comment. By the way, I promise here and now never, ever to take offence at anything you say and that nothing you write is taken personally. You're a person of goodwill, so you can say anything you want and I'll publish it--you should hear what my friends and family say! And nothing you wrote is as confused as I've been at my middling, let alone my worst.